November 30, 1999

With Hemingway as Friend, Who Needed Enemies?

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

HEMINGWAY VS. FITZGERALD
The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship. By Scott Donaldson.

rnest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald must surely rank as one of the oddest couples in literary history. Best friends briefly
and later acrimonious rivals, they were two of their generation's pre-eminent writers, their mutual achievements obscured by the potent legends that accrued around their names.

Hemingway, whose hard, clean prose helped reinvent 20th-century English, is too often remembered for his posturing as an adventurer and macho man, while Fitzgerald, the author of ''The Great Gatsby,'' a
signal work in American literary history, is frequently shrugged off as a social historian of the 1920's, a Jazz Age playboy who allowed alcohol and self-indulgence to dissipate his charm.

In ''Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald,'' Scott Donaldson, author of earlier biographies of both men, laments the cult of celebrity that has diminished the accomplishments of artists, while putting ''every
detail of their private lives'' under ''intense scrutiny.'' His own book, however, turns out to be another exercise in what Joyce Carol Oates has called ''pathography,''
a form of biography that pays scant attention to an artist's work and instead focuses on his dysfunctional relationships and his slide into disrepute.

''Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald'' is a book filled with incidents of bad behavior, alcoholic excess and petty vendettas, a book that discusses ''Gatsby'' in terms of its alcoholic content
(''Gatsby himself is never drunk and the narrator Nick Carraway rarely so, but the book is saturated with liquor'') and quotes the psychoanalytic theorizing of so-called experts who never met Hemingway
or Fitzgerald. At one point Mr. Donaldson even cites an article called ''Love Survival: How to Mend a Broken Heart'' in an effort to illuminate the romantic difficulties of his subjects.

The volume draws heavily on correspondence between the two writers (as well as letters to their mutual editor, Maxwell Perkins), recent biographical studies and memoirs by mutual acquaintances like Morley Callaghan (''That
Summer in Paris'') and Robert McAlmon (''Being Geniuses Together''). Most of the material in ''Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald'' will be overwhelmingly familiar to any reader acquainted
with the lives of its two subjects. Once again we are told the story of how Fitzgerald helped the young Hemingway, acting as his agent and advocate and performing some crucial editing on ''The Sun Also Rises.''
And once again we are told the story of how Hemingway paid Fitzgerald back by belittling him to mutual friends and creating a snide, condescending (and probably fictionalized) portrait of him in ''A Moveable Feast.''

Hemingway, who ''could ill abide being beholden to anyone,'' clearly resented Fitzgerald's help, and in this book, as in many others, he receives the bulk of the blame for the friendship's demise.
He emerges from these pages as an ingrate and bully, a megalomaniac who projected his own insecurities onto those closest to him and who believed he needed to reject friends and lovers before they could reject him. Fitzgerald,
in contrast, comes across as a well-meaning but annoying fellow who hero-worshiped the wrong people, and who consistently sabotaged himself by getting drunk and behaving like a fool.

In one typically overwritten passage, Mr. Donaldson describes Hemingway as having ''a dark side to his nature, blacker than Zimbabwe granite.'' ''Hemingway felt a compulsion to dominate, to lord
it over others,'' he writes, ''and Fitzgerald had a complementary need to be dominated. If Ernest liked to kick, Scott wore a sign on his backside saying 'Kick Me.' ''

Mr. Donaldson argues that Hemingway consistently tried to spin the story of his friendship with Fitzgerald to his own advantage, misremembering his former friend's editorial suggestions ''through a pattern of
exaggerations, lies, and outright inventions.'' In addition he points out that Fitzgerald was not the only friend Hemingway repudiated, that Gertrude Stein, another mentor, was also dissed, as was Faulkner, a
fellow Nobel Prize winner.

While the friendship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald dwindled after 1926 -- they were rarely on the same continent during the 1930's and saw each other only four times in that decade -- Fitzgerald, in Mr. Donaldson's
words, ''struggled gamely to preserve the illusion of what had once been the closest of relationships.'' His star, however, was falling, while Hemingway's was ascendant, and his ''eagerness
to be involved in Ernest's life and career'' was now regarded as meddling on the part of a pathetic has-been.

Hemingway was condescending about Fitzgerald's work and mocked his former friend as a coward, a lap dog to the rich and a henpecked husband in thrall to a manipulative woman. He likened Fitzgerald to a dying butterfly,
a glass-jawed boxer and an unguided missile crashing to earth on a ''very steep trajectory.''

After Fitzgerald's death in 1940 at 44, Hemingway's attacks accelerated, in large measure, Mr. Donaldson suggests, because of the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald's reputation. During the last years of his life,
Fitzgerald indulged in the occasional gibe against his former friend (''Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up,'' he remarked), but for the most part he seems
to have regarded the lost friendship with wistful regret.

In chronicling the sad arc of the Fitzgerald-Hemingway relationship, Mr. Donaldson manages to give the reader a sense of his subjects' volatile personalities, not a particularly hard job given all that has been written
about the pair. But his reluctance to address their work seriously, coupled with his focus on the tawdry melodramas of their lives, results in a shallow, voyeuristic book.

''Hemingway and Fitzgerald were different, not better,'' he writes in one particularly trite passage. ''Each was great in his own way. In that league, no one had to lose for both of them to be
winners.'' Winners, it turns out, subject to today's laws of fame, and hence the focus of yet another cheesy chronicle of calamity and waste.